"poetry" blog posts
Citizens of Everywhere… in the Community: Perspectives on a Workshop
Citizens of Everywhere recently ran a workshop with Moving On With Life and Learning (MOWLL), a Liverpool-based charity that supports adults and young people with learning disabilities and mental health concerns. The 90-minute session, devised by a group of PhD students from the Universities of Liverpool, Manchester and Liverpool Hope, was designed to be a creative way in which to discuss the meaning of citizenship and definitions of Britishness with members of the local community.
Posted on: 14 August 2018
A Poem for the Citizens of Liverpool
The following poem was produced during a recent Citizens of Everywhere workshop with Liverpool-based charity Moving On With Life and Learning (MOWLL). The organisation caters to adults with learning disabilities, acquired brain injuries and mental health concerns, offering them the support to access vital services, and educational and creative opportunities in the city.
Posted on: 16 July 2018
Power Mediated: Three Poems from Brussels
Not long after moving to Brussels, I read these words of John Berger: ‘[In Livorno,] I discovered that I wanted as little as possible to do in this world with those who wield power.
Posted on: 26 June 2017
Poets and Borders
In response to Citizens of Everywhere, writer and project contributor Ilya Kaminsky has set up a new forum on the Poetry International website.
Posted on: 28 March 2017
How to be both...
From an early age my now 7-year-old son has been practising how to answer the familiar question: where do you come from? Growing up bilingual in Sheffield where this question frequently doubles as a query about national identity, his first tactic was to reply according to the language in which the question was posed. If you asked him whether he was English or Spanish in English, he would always be English. Try the same question in Spanish and, perhaps not surprisingly, he would suddenly be Spanish. (Woody Allen’s Zelig acts similarly, changing his accent and appearance depending on who he is with.) As my son got older, probably around 4 or 5, he preferred to be both. “I’m English and Spanish,” he would affirm, the stress always landing on that conjunction.
Posted on: 21 February 2017
When day breaks we will be off
A poem by James Byrne.
Posted on: 21 February 2017